The agonising pace of the last
Nazi trialThe final chance to get
justice for 27,900 Jews murdered at Sobibor has descended into farce

He used to cover his face with a grey baseball cap to try to escape the
glare of publicity, but that was over a year ago. These days the judges
have relented: the man alleged to be the last Nazi mass murderer to
face justice is allowed to wear sunglasses in court all the time --
even if the world's media now virtually ignores him.

Ninety-year-old John Demjanjuk is suspected of having been a brutal
prison guard at the infamous Sobibor extermination camp in
German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. He stands accused
of complicity in the slaughter of 27,900 Jews, most of whom were Dutch.
Yet, lying prone on a hospital bed wrapped up in a green prison
coverlet, Mr Demjanjuk often falls asleep as evidence against him is
read out in court.

The Demjanjuk trial has been billed as Germany's, and quite possibly
the world's, final attempt to bring one of the remaining suspected Nazi
war criminals to justice. For elderly Holocaust survivors such as Jules
Schelvis, whose entire family was murdered in Sobibor, a verdict is far
more important than retribution: "Justice must be done and be seen to
be done, the sentence is almost irrelevant," he declared as the trial
opened. He is one of the very few to have survived Sobibor.

[W.Z. Jules
Schelvis testified that he did not see any Ukrainians at Sobibor -- let
alone John Demjanjuk. He also confirmed (at least in his case) that
Sobibor was a transit camp, since he -- along with others -- was
sent to dig peat moss for the Germans. It is ironic that this is
exactly what John Demjanjuk testified that the Germans forced him to do
as a POW.]

The Munich court case against Mr Demjanjuk began in November 2009 and
was meant to end in early 2010 at the latest. No one is making
predictions now. "We are not quite sure when it will end," said Michael
Koch, one of the lawyers representing the families of Sobibor victims.
"If things don't go in our favour, we could still be here in October."

The scores of reporters from across the globe who attended the trial
opening have gone. So have nearly all the relatives of those who were
murdered in Sobibor. As a result, the case has been shifted to Munich
Court B266, a smaller and dingier 1970s-built courtroom. Among the few
journalists who now cover the proceedings is a reporter who works for a
neo-Nazi website. [Name?]

Were it not for the gravity of the crimes that Ukranian-born defendant
is alleged to have committed, his appearances in court, would qualify
as material for a television farce. The trial often degenerates into
stand-up shouting matches between Ralph Alt, the presiding judge, and
Ulrich Busch, Mr Demjanjuk's defence lawyer -- not least because the
proceedings are agonisingly slow. Every shred of evidence read out in
court has to be simultaneously translated into Ukranian by a court
translator to enable Mr Demjanjuk to comprehend what is going on. Yet
the accused says nothing and only ever opens his mouth to emit moans or
strange gurgling sounds.

The proceedings have been slowed to a snail's pace by the aged and
apparently ailing defendant's state of health. Doctors have ruled that
bone marrow disease and the fact that he suffers from anaemia, attacks
of gout, and chronic hip pain mean that he is only fit to appear in
court for two days a week for a maximum of three hours a day. They are
by no means certain that he will live long enough to witness the end of
his own trial. Proceedings often grind to a halt as soon as they start
with doctors proclaiming that their patient is "not well enough to
attend court today". Mr Demjanjuk is then driven back to his cell in
Stadelheim prison, Munich, where he has been incarcerated since his
extradition from the US in May 2009.

But Mr Demjanjuk's health is far from being the only barrier in the way
of justice being done and being seen to be done. The prosecution case
is severely hampered by the fact that there is not a single witness
still alive who remembers having seen Mr Demjanjuk in Sobibor.

One of the few witnesses who had been expected to help solve this
problem was a former Nazi death camp guard called Samuel Kunz who had
been due to give evidence last month. But Kunz, who also faced the
prospect of being tried himself for the alleged murder of thousands of
Jews, died quietly at his home near Bonn in the middle of November 2010 aged
89.

The main piece of evidence against Mr Demjanjuk is what is alleged to
be his SS identity card, No 1393, which has been released to the court
from former Soviet archives. The other is a statement by a former and
now deceased camp guard called Ignat Danilchenko, who testified under
Soviet interrogation that he had seen Mr Demjanjuk driving Jews into
the gas chambers of Sobibor. However, Mr Demjanjuk's defence lawyer
argues that the ID card is a fake document manufactured by the KGB in
order to deliberately incriminate Mr Demjanjuk. He has also found other
statements by Danilchenko which contradict his claims about having seen
Mr Demjanjuk in Sobibor. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned
a previous conviction of Demjanjuk saying it had reasonable doubts
about his identification as another Nazi prison guard nicknamed Ivan
the Terrible.

The court must also decide whether to accept an argument put forward by
the prosecution, which has no legal precedent in post-war death camp
trials. This proposition, backed by historians' research, maintains
that simply by being employed as an SS guard in Sobibor, Mr Demjanjuk
would automatically have taken part in the mass murder of prisoners.
The defence argues that such claims are ridiculous, and that the
prosecution must prove not only that he was there but that he also
murdered.

Mr Demjanjuk may never have addressed the court in person, but on the
first anniversary of the opening of his court case in Germany last
November, his lawyer read out a statement from him. In it, Mr Demjanjuk
claimed to be a "simple prisoner of war" who was being unjustly
prosecuted by a German judiciary which in the past had not only
acquitted war criminals but also not even bothered to prosecute them.

History bears out his latter claim. Germany's post-war legal system was
often massively short on justice. Back in 1966, 11 former Nazi SS men
were tried by a West German court for the genocide at Sobibor. Only
Karl Frenzel, the camp commandant, was sentenced to life imprisonment
for his crimes. The court heard accounts of how Frenzel whipped a dying
prisoner and then pulled out a pistol and shot him dead. Five other
defendants were given jail terms of between three and eight years. The
other five were acquitted. At scores of similar trials during the same
era, defendants had charges against them dropped simply because they
could argue that they were only obeying orders and that not to have
done so would have meant their own certain deaths.

[W.Z. The
statement that the Germans did not prosecute "former Nazi SS men" is
simply not true. In her testimony at the John Demjanjuk trial in
Jerusalem on1987/03/25, Helge Grabitz stated: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------T003327 - Grabitz is a state attorney in Hamburg dealing with Nazi criminals
since February 1966: "At that time there were 27 attorneys who devoted all their
time to such cases." [INCREDIBLE!] In 1979 she was appointed Deputy Head and in
1983 she became Head of the Division.- Grabitz describes in
detail how these criminal jury trials are handled. The documentary material is
archived in Koblenz (Federal) or the archives of the Lander.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Excerpt from a summary of the English-language transcripts archived at/fc/transcripts/transcripts02.html )

Furthermore,
there were mass arrests, interrogations under torture and prosecutions
of "suspected war criminals" immediately after the WWII in preparation
for the Nurnberg Trials, where the "Victors wreaked Vengeance on the
Vanquished". The Red Cross reported that, in 95% of the detainees that
they examined, the testicles of the tortured prisoners were inoperable.]

The Demjanjuk trial, as today's fortysomething state prosecutors and
lawyers put it, is an attempt by a "new generation within the German
judicial system" to make amends for the gross shortcomings of the past.
German historian Norbert Frei sums it up as follows: "The Germans owe
it not only to the victims and the survivors to put Mr Demjanjuk on
trial, they also owe it to themselves."

[W.Z.
I would submit that the "Germans owe to themselves, their
deceased and to humanity" to do a detailed examination of the
atrocities committed against the German people and to prosecute of the
perpetrators of these "crimes against humanity". Why are Germans not
even allowed to pray for the souls of their dead?]